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DJ LP Giobbi, left, shares a laugh with Backline Executive Director Hilary Gleason during the "Being the Change" lab at the 2025 Song Summit Park City. Organizers announced the lineup for this year's event that will run Aug. 27-29. Credit: Photo courtesy of Mario Alcauter

The 2025 Park City Song Summit labs ended on a high note Saturday afternoon.

DJ LP Giobbi, the founder of Femme House, and Backline Executive Director Hilary Gleason shared their journeys in a discussion titled “Being the Change” that covered not only their careers as female entrepreneurs and their human-service nonprofits.

Gleason and Giobbi addressed why they started their organizations.

“I started to feel this drive in my body towards that I need to be doing something,” Gleason said about Backline, a nonprofit she founded in 2019 that connects “music industry professionals and their families with mental health and wellness resources” after spearheading a series of conversations across the music industry revealed the need for access to customized mental-health resources. “It’s somewhere deep in my stomach I feel when I wake up (each morning). I don’t work on a project that doesn’t have an impact piece. I don’t think I would be satisfied if I didn’t do that.”

One of Gleason’s driving forces is privilege.

“I was raised by nurses in North Carolina, and I had some of the best access to healthcare in the world,” she said. “If something happened to me they would call the emergency room and they would open the backdoor and walk me in. (So) I’ve had some of the most incredible privilege to access healthcare, access to education. Of course, being white helps a lot in selling everything I need to sell for Backline.”

Giobbi, whose Femme House “creates opportunities for women, gender-expansive, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+  creatives in the technical and behind the scenes areas of music,” also cited privilege as her motivation. 

“I know I’m not the best producer, piano player or musician or anything, but I worked really hard, and I have a lot of privilege,” said the world-renowned DJ, who is also a jazz-trained pianist. “(So) I feel if I’m not taking full advantage of that, I don’t understand how lucky I am.”

While Giobbi knows her success also stems from “extreme luck.”

“(This is) a gift, but I’ve been giving this opportunity,” she said. “So I (need) to get out and do something with it.”

Sometimes Giobbi finds herself trying to self-sabotage, when it comes to wondering if she is doing any good.

“I do know that I tie my self-worth to productivity, which is something I do not like,” she said. “But my mom gave me some really good advice when I started this (because) I thought this was a selfish endeavor, because it was all about me.”

Giobbi’s mother, who is a Deadhead, told her that attending live Grateful Dead concerts helped maintain mental wellness.

“She said, ‘They got me through the week, and it’s the thing your dad and I did that brought us so much joy and was medicine to us,’” Giobbi remembered. “She said, ‘So if you do want to do this, it is a privilege and you can give back to people through that.’”

Although it’s 2025, Gleason and Giobbi still experience setbacks while being female entrepreneurs in the male-centric music business.

One is the continual man-to-man communication in the music industry, according to Gleason, who at 17 helped create a neural-surgical training program in Uganda.

“My biggest gripe is people always want to call my chairman, instead of me,” Gleason said. “They may know him a few years longer than I have, but he doesn’t know the day-to-day workings of Backline. So they’ll call him and ask for a really specific answer. So, I’ll text them, ‘Hey, can you call me next?’” 

Like Gleason, Giobbi, who also owns a record label, Yes Yes Yes, does face sexism in her job.

“I have an amazing tour manager, and I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve played when we’ll walk up and they will hand the headphones to him,” Giobbi said. “It’s happened over and over, and he’s like, ‘No. She’s the DJ.’”

Giobbi also noted that she didn’t see any female DJs she could look up to while growing up.

“It’s hard to be what you can’t see, and I’ve struggled with believing I could do something without having mentors,” she said.

That’s one of the reasons why Giobbi founded Femme House.

“There is a lot of blatant sexism that I’ve come across, and a lot has been internalized,” she said.

Gleason, whose consulting firm, level (spelled in all lowercase letters), connects businesses and bands to impactful nonprofit organizations, began working with Giobbi’s Femme House a few years ago, said the work Femme House is doing gives people opportunities to reverse the music industry’s sexism. 

“(Unfortunately) there are funders who are concerned about government relations, and they don’t want to fund things that say, ‘gender expansive’ because it’s controversial all of a sudden,” Gleason said. “So much work has been done to make those conversations not controversial, but it does feel like we’ve taken a few steps back.”

Still, Giobbi has been pleasantly shocked to see many electronic-music gatekeepers approach Femme House to help make their events more inclusive.

“One of the biggest electronic promoters in the world, Insomniac, asked how we can make their raves more diverse. So that was cool to see.” 

In addition to discussing the challenges and rewards of being female social-impact makers in the music industry, Giobbi and Gleason also talked about their love of the Grateful Dead and the similarities shared between the Deadhead and EDM communities.

“I took my dad to his first rave,” Giobbi said. “He said, ‘If I was born now, I would be a raver instead of a hippie, but everything else is pretty much the same.’”

The sameness comes through the non-stop dancing, and not knowing what the DJ will play next, according to Giobbi.

“It’s improvisational that way, and the community respect is similar,” she said. “I started seeing what I was doing through that lens.”

That vision eventually got Giobbi in touch with Ben Baruch, who is considered “The King of the jam-band world.”

That connection helped Giobbi put together the Deadhouse project, which frames Grateful Dead music in the electronic sphere.

“I’m not going to lie, but there are some Deadheads who hate me,” she said. “I know how much this music means to people, and playing with it or messing with it is not what some people like, and I respect that.”

Still, Giobbi, the music director for W Hotels, has already tasted some of the sweet fruits of that labor.

“After I played my first Deadhouse set, a dad came over to me and said, ‘My son’s a raver and I’m a Deadhead, and we’ve never gotten along. Tonight we came to your set together, and it was the first hours of joy we shared. So thank you.’”